About Australia (Travel Information)
The Media
The Murdoch-owned Australian is Australia’s only national daily newspaper; aimed mainly at the business community, it has good overseas coverage but local news is often built around statistics. Each state (or more properly, each state capital) has its own daily paper – sometimes more than one – ranging from Queensland’s vapid, reactionary Courier Mail to the more thoughtful Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s venerable The Age. The last two, both Fairfax-owned are probably the most objective of Australia’s papers and are also widely available across much of the country.
Local papers are always a good source of listings, if not news. You should be able to track down some international papers, or their overseas editions – British, American, Asian and European – in the state capitals. The weekly Time Australia and Newsweek/Bulletin are the current affairs magazines. The monthly HQ focuses on literature, the arts and current affairs from a younger but sophisticated international and Australian perspective, while Juice is an intelligent and amusing music/popular culture mag. If you’re interested in wildlife, pick up a copy of Geo or the bimonthly Australian Geographic (related only in name to the US magazine) for some excellent photography and in-depth coverage of Australia’s remoter corners. There are some excellent glossy Australian-focused adventure travel magazines, too, like the Victorian based monthly Expanse and the quarterly Wild. You’ll find Australian versions of all the fashion mags, from Vogue to Elle, plus enduring and endearing publications like the Australian Women’s Weekly (now monthly) which is well-known for its excellent recipes, and gossipy magazines like Who Weekly featuring the lowdown on the antics of international and Australian celebs. On a different note, the Australian version of The Big Issue, produced out of Melbourne, is called The Big Issue Australia and has been operating since 1996. Vendors are homeless, ex-homeless or long term unemployed and make half of the $2 cover price.

Australia’s first television station opened in 1956 and the country didn’t get colour television until 1974 – both much later than other westernized countries. Australian television isn’t particularly exciting unless you’re into sport, of which there’s plenty, and commercial stations put on frequent commercial breaks – with often annoyingly unsophisticated advertisements – throughout films. There are Australian content rulings which mean that there are a good amount of Australian dramas, series and soap operas, many of which go on to make it big overseas, from Neighbours and Home and Away to Blue Heelers. However, there’s a predominance of American programmes and lots of repeats. Australian TV is also fairly permissive in terms of sexual content compared to the programming of Britain or North America. There are three predictable commercial stations (in the cities these are Channel Ten, Channel Nine and Channel Seven but they have different numbers in the countryside). Channel Nine aims for an older market with more conservative programming, while Channel Ten tries to grab the younger market with some good comedy programmes including Good News Week and the irreverent talk show The Panel. In addition, there is also the more serious ABC (or Channel Two) – a national, advertisment-free station still with quite a British bias, showing all the best British sitcoms and mini-series – and the livelier SBS, a government-sponsored, multicultural station, which has the best coverage of world news, as well as interesting current affairs programmes and plenty of foreign-language films (and now carefully timed advertisements which fit into the upmarket end of the scale). In more remote areas you will not be able to access all five channels and often only ABC and SBS are receivable. There are two pay TV stations, Optus and the Murdoch-owned Foxtel, though the pay - TV culture is not firmly established yet as in other countries, and even expensive hotels often still only have terrestial TV.

The best radio is on the various ABC stations, both local and national. ABC Radio National – broadcast all over Australia – offers a popular mix of arty intellectual topics, and another ABC station, 2JJJ (“Triple J”), a former Sydney-based alternative rock station, is aimed at the nation’s youth and is available across the country in only slightly watered-down form.